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False Prophet

A year and a half ago I was so convinced that President Obama would be a transformational figure that I began work on book notes, and registered a domain name obamaconvergence.com, in anticipation of writing a book about the changes I guessed the Obama presidency would wrought.

I thought certain that Obama would change America’s place in the world, use the failure of finance capitalism to reassert the rightful place of industrial capitalism and the role of producing value in the economy, while righting our energy policy and rationalizing health care. Eighteen months on, I have to admit to being a false prophet.

While Obama has made great strides with healthcare, the end result, I’m afraid, will prove less than useful to most American families. We see this month and last, that we have not had the courage or the depth of perspective, to rewrite our engagement in two wars which can only be described, at best, as partial failures. Our energy policy, despite the visionary appointment of Stephen Chu, as Energy Secretary still remains broken. And finally, Wall Street reform remains a dark disappointment. Far too much of our economy remains ensnared in a finance capitalism that fails to reward real innovation, real creation of value. Instead simply moving money about remains unsustainably, the engine of too much profit making in our economy. Unless we rewire the basic nature of rewards, benefits and penalties in our economy, we will fail to return to a broad-based prosperity, where productivity from the bulk of American families is properly sustained and rewarded.

And this doesn’t even touch upon Obama’s educational policy, which in the hands of non-educator Arne Duncan, has been disastrous. Using the carrot of federal dollars, Obama’s education policy has pushed states and thousands of school districts down the policy cul-de-sacs of “transforming” schools and punishing teachers, approaches that research has proven as failures and distract powerfully from addressing real issues, many of which have proximate, research-proven, solutions.

Why this avalanche of failure and only partial success? Are American institutions too resistant to reform to be meaningfully changed. Or are Americans too disengaged, too misinformed by a media obsessed with entertainment rather than truth, maybe even too ignorant and lazy, to grasp the levers of their own future? Is this the decay that we have long been warned about, the last gasps of American hegemony, not just as a superpower, but as the “city on the hill,” the shining light of democracy, freedom, and a Lockean (as opposed to Hobbesian) vision of human nature?

While history will render a final verdict, it seems our nation needs reform root and branch. We have collectively calcified an unsustainable status quo. Common sense solutions are eschewed as politically untenable. Concentrated power, especially the power of concentrated wealth, is viewed as unassailable. We have become, in part measure, a nation of cowards, afraid of the truth, afraid of the consequences of speaking truth to power. We have exalted and empowered the individual to the detriment of the common weal. Our institutions are captive to narrow interests, and we lack the focus and resolve necessary to meet our common challenges. While the nation has been resolute in the past, it is dissolute in meeting its future.